* * *

Crimea had barely any Russians until the mid-19th century and no outright majority until the mid-20th.

Anyway, either we live in a civilised era where things like ethnic cleansing and genocide should be condemned, or we live in an era where it is 'bog standard to invade a place occupied by your co-ethnics'.

After WW2, ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Königsberg and Poles and Ukrainians were uprooted forcefully into the boundaries of their modern nation-states.

If wars of conquest on the basis of 'this place contains our people' become 'bog standard', the ethnic cleansing of post-WW2 Europe and the post-Soviet Balkans becomes the inevitable and logical conclusion.

> Crimea had barely any Russians until the mid-19th century and no outright majority until the mid-20th.

And it had considerably fewer Ukrainians[1]. The Ukrainian claim to Crimea is weaker than Russia's.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Ethnic_P...

And that has absolutely nothing to do with anything I said; your claim was that Crimea was populated with Russians since Rurik, which is maybe true but extremely misleading because it constituted a percentage point or two at best. Bringing up the Ukrainian population accounts for nought unless you're suggesting expelling all the Slavs from Crimea and returning it to Tatar rule.

> The Ukrainian claim to Crimea is weaker than Russia's.

The Ukrainian claim to Crimea is stronger because they have a legal basis to its claim. If we return to a state of the world where claims to land are made on the basis of 'my group lives here, therefore it's ours', we will inevitably reap the consequences of post-war Europe.

On the same logic, Germany had a stronger claim to the Sudetenland than Czechoslovakia. But what did that get the Germans in the end? Complete expulsion from the Sudetenland.